Team Awareness in Personalized Learning Environments

In most of today’s campus-like learning settings, students are frequently confronted with e-learning systems that do not only deliver and display learning content, but are equipped with a number of integrated tools for file sharing, communication, personalisation (personal annotations, text marking, etc) and cooperation. However, recent observations show that these functions are rarely used. One reason for not using the technological opportunities for informal communication and interaction is the poor design of such systems with respect to team awareness in learning teams. The poor support for synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaboration in today’s e-learning systems has motivated the development and prototypical implementation of a context-aware team interaction support system. This offers up-to-the-moment information about the location, state and activities of learning teams, thus helping to build up awareness of the surroundings in which team learning processes can take place. In this paper, we present an extensible awareness system, which is capable of providing context information in a presentation-independent format. A team space is provided for mobile learning teams, integrating state and task awareness functionality with a means of synchronous and asynchronous communication.